What do you think the next big evolution in interconnect voice management platforms will be, and when?

Holy Schmokes! That’s a big question or questions. I like to pretend I have insight into the future and can predict what’s going to happen, but sheezus…that’s a challenging question. Here’s what I think I know, or I mean I know I think. Automation and scale is still paramount to our industry. We need to provide carriers with the tools and capabilities to increase scale while limiting or reducing the overhead associated with that scale. Remember that million dollar per employee metric people were chasing in the late 90s dot com bubble? Well, we think the metric for voice should be around 50M minutes per employee per year and that the goal should be to get that to 150M minutes per employee per year, a 300% increase!

Doing that will require continued investment in automation and scale, both intertwined and interdependent. But, also, they both have their own unique attributes. Automation requires constant expansion of the perspective of the workflows, the algorithms, and the stated business processes. Scale focuses on speed, software architecture, and processing power. If I had to make a bet, it would be that the next big evolution in interconnect voice management will be in automation. Over the next several years we are going to see carriers managing larger and larger volumes of voice traffic with fewer people. Every department (NOC, finance, sales, product management, etc.) will be impacted. The future of interconnect voice is a future with fewer people. This is starting to sound like Skynet’s biz plan so I am going to stop now and try think up some brighter possibilities for the future.